Saturday, September 29, 2012

Caps! Caps for Sale! Fifty cents a cap! I think I repeated this 5 times a day, every day this week. Caps For Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina is a great book with an exciting and unexpected twist at the end. A peddler selling his caps takes a nap under a tree. When he wakes up, all of his caps have been taken by monkeys. He gets very angry at the monkeys and yells at them while making gestures. The monkeys just repeat the actions that he makes while saying Tsz, tsz, tsz. In the end, he throws his cap on the ground in frustration and then all the monkeys throw their caps down to the ground. Thus, he gets his caps back. We started the week by talking about the peddler and all of his different feelings. We also talked about how he was dressed and his peculiar "handlebar" mustache. So, we made our own:

Of course we had to stack our own caps! First they had to group them by color and count them. Then, they stacked them on our very own peddler.

And then.... a little balancing act of our own:

And my two peddler's yelling at the monkeys:

Then, we moved on to monkeys. We talked about what the saying "monkey see, monkey do" means. We read Good Night Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann, Monkey See Monkey Do by Marc Gave and Amazing Animals: Monkeys by Valerie Bodden. We took a trip to the zoo and looked at several species of monkeys and apes. No pictures of the zoo...it seems every time we visit the monkeys, they are doing something obscene. Thankfully, the boys have not caught on to this yet. We sang Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed and made thumbprint monkey's in a tree (the black lines are tails made out of pipe cleaners):

And, what would the week be like without a fun treat? We made chocolate covered frozen banana pops with chocolate sprinkles. The boys said they were great...the one bite that I had tasted pretty good ;)

Tsz, Tsz, Tsz?

C is all about the silly posing these days... personally, I think he looks a little touched.

I used bits and pieces from two different lapbooks (homeschool share and homeschool creations) this week. We did a page on phonics, rhyming and made a book that introduces the concept of cents. We looked at pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters:

We wrapped up the book with some acorns! Since it is officially fall, we talked about the season and read a few fall/autumn books. We made acorn faces to show the feelings of the peddler and used the caps of the acorn to make a Memory game:

BIBLE

We talked about some of God's promises this week and our story was on Abraham & Isaac. Our memory verses were Psalm 148:5 and...Luke 1:37:

Nothing is impossible with God. Luke 1:37 (Not sure what the 2 fingers at the end are. Peace?)

I started the week off by showing them a present that was wrapped with Spiderman (their favorite!) paper. I told them that there was something very special inside that God made. There were many (hopeful) guesses of new toys. I talked about patience and how we would have to wait to open it, but I promised that we would open it before the end of the week. That lead into our lesson about Abraham and how God promised him a son. Abraham had to be patient and wait a long time before God's promise was fulfilled.

The Day of opening the box:

It was....a mirror!

I was so happy that they understood right away that the special gift w

as them.

You can't tell by this silly picture, but there was no fuss about no new "toys".

We focused on God's Promise to: never destroy the earth with water (rainbow), hear us when we pray (listening ear), send His son Jesus to die for our sins (cross) and love us and never forsake us. They got to choose their favorite promise and color it and make it into a gift.

Our mobile with all the images/promises.

B's rainbow

Lastly, we talked about the birth of Isaac and what his name meant. Then, we looked at their baby books and talked about how special they were to Mommy and Daddy!

Hard to believe this was nearly 4.5 years ago.

MATH

We moved on to lesson number 5 this week. The boys are doing great with writing their numbers. They had to count the blocks that were shaded in and write the answer. There was a bit of review of the other methods at the end of the lesson.

HANDWRITING

We made our N's and M's this week. Next week we'll be reviewing all of the capital's we've done so far.

PHONICS

Another great week of reading in this house! I promise there will be a video next week!!

We'll be lightening the load next week as we are going on a camping trip!

Monday, September 24, 2012

We had a great time rowing Blueberries For Sal by Robert McCloskey. We got to do so many fun things this week! The story is about a little girl who goes to blueberry hill to pick berries with her mother to can for the winter. While she is there, she gets separated from her mother and goes on the search for her. Meanwhile, there is also a mother bear and little bear eating berries to "store up food for the winter." Very cute story. We started the week off by completing some of our lapbook:

We also sharpened our scissor skills (sharpened, get it, haha!) by cutting out blueberries to fill up a tin pail printable:

And, it wouldn't be a very blueberry week without starting one of our mornings off with some delectable (Jiffy mix) blueberry muffins.

DISCLAIMER: Apparently, this was funny face week and I was not informed. After looking back through the pictures, I have tons of crazy face pictures.

We also made our very own blueberry play-dough (find the recipe here) and had our own blueberry picking adventure. Unfortunately, it is too late in the season to go pick your own. So, I had to improvise. Luckily, we have some very nice bushes in our front yard that worked famously. Pictures and film of the now famous berry hunt:

Home-made blueberry bush... They check the bushes every time we go outside to see if blueberry hill is back :)

After the Great Hunt, we took a break and made our own blueberry bushes with the play-doh and had a blueberry snack:

We wrapped up the week with a little finger-painting. We made our own blueberry pies and blueberry bushes.

They got to experience their first tasting of Pop Rocks, thanks to MeMe & Pops. They were blueberry flavored, so hey, what a great tie in. See video below!

BIBLE

This week we focused on how we can pray to God, hear from God and serve God anywhere and anytime. Our memory verses were Psalm 148:4 and...Colossians 3:23:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart,

as working for the Lord not for human masters. Colossians 3:23

We started off with the story of Hannah and how she went to the temple to pray to God for a baby. We made a sad/happy Hannah face puppet to retell the story:

Played a fun game of hitting a bullseye with our airplane to talk about places that we can pray:

Next,
we talked about how Hannah took Samuel back to the temple to serve the
Lord. We made paper chains with ways we could serve (more cutting skills!) and looked at
different pictures of places that we could serve:

Finally, we ended with the story of God calling Samuel. We had a great song/fingerplay that we learned to the tune of Are You Sleeping? Instead, it is called Where is Samuel?

Where is Samuel, where is Samuel?

Here I am, here I am.

Did you call me Eli? No, I didn't Samuel.

It's the Lord, go to bed.

Where is Samuel, where is Samuel?

Here I am, here I am.

Speak Lord I am listening, speak Lord I am listening.

Then God spoke, then God spoke.

They thought the best part of the song was, "It's the Lord, go to bed!" Perhaps my favorite part of this was reliving my childhood days. Our library has the Nest Entertainment Family Video's that I used to watch in children's church! I found the Samuel movie and we got to watch it as a wrap-up. So fun!

MATH

We flew through lesson 4 in two days, although the picture above would not suggest that! They had to identify/count rectangles of a certain color/pattern and review shading in blocks. Lesson 5 requires writing out the number as the answer vs circling it on a number line or tracing it. So, the rest of the week was spent on learning to write our numbers. We use Learn & Go Numbers, a wipe-off book that we can reuse.

HANDWRITING

We worked on B's and R's this week. B was a natural at B's since he has been able to write his name for awhile. C picked it up rather quickly as we were only adding another little curve to last weeks "P". Mommy worked on her pirate jokes for all of the Arrrrrr's they were doing! Though, I was the only one laughing. ...sigh... Does that mean they are already too cool for me?

About Me

The Mommy School is where my boys come to school everyday, in our home. I am learning that not only are they learning school from Mommy, but Mommy is learning from them too. I am thanking God for the little treasure's that He has gifted to me.